Question of the week: the first fantasy novel

It’s time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics.

This week’s question: what is the first fantasy novel you remember reading? After all, if you’re hanging around the website of Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer, there’s a non-zero chance that you enjoy fantasy books, so it seems like a suitable question.

For myself, the very first fantasy novel I read was MAGICIAN: MASTER by Raymond E. Feist. What got me into that was the BETRAYAL AT KRONDOR computer game, which was a classic. After I finished the game, I did some reading (remember this was way before the Internet, so you couldn’t find out anything you wanted whenever you wanted), and I was astonished to realize that KRONDOR was based off an actual novel series. So I got MAGICIAN: MASTER and started reading it.

Fun fact: years later I realized that MAGICIAN: MASTER was in fact the sequel to MAGICIAN: APPRENTICE and went back to read the first book.

-JM